Empowering Self-disclosure: The Active Post-retiree Life Accounts of Malaysian and Singaporean Senior Citizens

Abstract

The elderly have become a major issue in many countries today. Health, lifestyles, living conditions and family support are important considerations for the elderly. Many of their peers have passed on and the elderly tend to be lonely. Sociolinguists (e.g. Matsumoto 2005; Coupland et al. 1991) have shown that the elderly tend to reveal their lives to interlocutors. Whilst self-disclosure discourses might be seen as strategies of rapport building (Egan 1994: 138), Peterson (1999) wrote that elderly discourse is a way of sharing acts of ‘elderly heroism’. It is the elderly person’s way of telling a compassionate listener what they have been through, how much they have suffered and what they are now experiencing. Doing so enables them to achieve a sense of integrity and establish an intimate connection with the listener. Such discourse has been termed ‘Painful Self-Disclosure’ (henceforth, PSD), and Bonnesen and Hummert (2002) describe PSD as an elderly phenomenon. They mention that PSD can be disempowering to the elderly as such discourses emphasise the negative aspects of ageing. PSD is thus seen as negative discourse, and reflects the perils of ageing (Matsumoto 2005) since such talk reveals the narrator’s unhappy personal situation, such as ill health, immobility, sadness and also self-despair.